Survey Says: Widespread Conversion To EMR Systems May Take 15+ Years
The Nuance study consisted of an online survey of forty physician practices with five or more full time physicians plus follow-up telephone interviews with six of them. Quoting from the survey's executive summary, "The objective of the study was to understand how practices handle paper within their practices, the challenges that arise in a paper-based or hybrid medical record system and their satisfaction with their current practices. The results of the study provide interesting insight not only into the progress the United States healthcare system has made in adopting electronic health records but also just how far it has to go before patient care documentation processes are predominantly electronic."
The study's authors concluded that "complete implementation of EHR systems by ambulatory physician practices with meaningful use of those tools and elimination of the vast majority of paper in these practices will take at a minimum of 10-15 years and potentially many years longer."
I believe this type of research has important implications for those of us within the medical transcription field. The demand for what I would call "traditional" healthcare documentation methods continues to be strong in spite of the hype surrounding the push for EMR implementation. Don't misunderstand me, big changes in the way we do what we do are coming, no doubt about that. But the sky is not falling, and the need for medical transcription as we know it today isn't going away any time soon.
The real question in my mind is whether or not our profession has found the bottom of the compensation freefall. Unless the industry figures out a way to fairly compensate healthcare documentation professionals as knowledge workers instead of widget makers, it won't matter how strong the demand is because there'll be nobody left to do the work.
Am I over-dramatizing? Yes...but not by much.
Jay Vance, CMT
AHDI Lounge Administrator/Moderator
Director, District 1
AHDI National Leadership Board
"The real question in my mind is whether or not our profession has found the bottom of the compensation freefall. Unless the industry figures out a way to fairly compensate healthcare documentation professionals as knowledge workers instead of widget makers, it won't matter how strong the demand is because there'll be nobody left to do the work."
And therein lies the rub. Any reasonable person understands that all careers experience transition issues at some point as they morph to accommodate client needs and times. In addition, many industries remain in a constant state of flux, ever evolving and changing. In our field, the REAL issue isn't about the changes that we're going through; it's about the unfair (and in some cases downright unethical) compensation strategies that are associated with these changes. MTSOs continue to squeeze the workforce for every penny that they can, yet don't seem willing to pay livable wages while torrent streams of income flow to those at the top of the pyramid. Granted, the primary objective of any company is to generate profit, but when does the madness end? The MTs, the only true revenue generators in the transcription cycle, are always the first to have their blood drawn at the altar of the pay cut, and that without apology. The cuts have been so skillfully delivered that line pay is no longer the true indicator for how much an MT is actually going to make. So many cuts have been made over the years in different variables that affect MT pay that it's almost a shadow box in terms of what the pay check will reflect in real dollars once delivered. The ultimate slap is that the MTSOs even push THEIR costs of doing business to the MT side of the table, i.e, long distance costs, equipment purchases, reference materials, office space, supplies, etc. It's clear that their position is that they should once, now, and always be the recipient of the best benefits from both sides of the table.
Make no mistake about it--the day is coming, and coming soon, when the workforce is finally going to collectively begin to refuse to continue to accept wholesale poverty wages in exchange for highly skilled work. It will be interesting to see how the head honchos at the MTSOs will react when THEY'RE finally hit with the repercussions of how unjust they've been with respect to MT compensation over the years when they begin to have difficulty in staffing their accounts. The technology may indeed prove eventually to be the golden parachute that they've always hoped it would be, thereby completely eliminating us. From what I've seen, though, it won't be happening any time soon.
Great article, Jay.